"The women of Bikini Kill let guitarist Billy Karren be in their feminist punk band, but only if he's willing to just "do some shit." Being a feminist dude is like that. We may ask you to "do some shit" for the band, but you don't get to be Kathleen Hannah."--@heatherurehere

Friday, January 04, 2008

Men Who Do Feminist Work -- The Men of the Movie "Protagonist":Mark Pierpont, Joe Loya, Mark Salzman and Hans-Joachim Klein

I recently had the great pleasure of watching Jessica Yu's film, Protagonist. I am sometimes a bit of a documentary film junkie, and I was looking around for something to watch on ye old online-dvd-in-the-mail service's webpage, and ran into this film. Yu has several other prior films to her credit, and I haven't seen any of them, though I hope to see them all, now that I've seen this one.

The premise of the documentary is simple: Yu interlaces the stories of four men who, on the face of it, only seem to have a few things in common. As the film goes on, the relationships between the men's stories begin to come into focus, and it turns out that all four men have been struggling with various strains of traditional masculinity, and, though self-analyzing struggle, have found different sorts of masculinities to embrace.

I'm being extremely heavy-handed in my analysis, but the film itself has a pretty light touch. It wasn't until the last third of the movie that I realized that masculinity was really at the center of things for these men--and recognizing the ways in which they could reject rigid gender roles helped them to overcome some of the central difficulties of their lives. Feminism isn't mentioned by name here, and it's pretty clear that the men involved might not characterize themselves as doing feminist work, but, since feminist theory has done so much of the heavy lifting as regards railing against traditionally rigid gender roles, I say they are doing feminist work nonetheless.

I encourage everybody who is interested in documentary storytelling, men who are struggling with traditional conceptions of masculinity, and pro-feminist men in general to check out the film. And I don't think I can encourage you to do so more than by giving a bit of background on these four men. From the movie's site:

What these descriptions don't tell you is that all four men were able to creating something of a reversal of their own fortunes, even though there was still a cost associated with how they were before the reversal.

Thanks for Jessica Yu, and to these four men, for creating such an interesting window into the inner lives of men and their relationship to traditionally rigid conceptions of masculinity.